Nights

H.D.’s Nights is about one woman’s attempt to get to the essence of her bisexuality and failed marriage through an illicit heterosexual affair––an attempt that eventually ends in suicide. Much like a mystery novel, we are given the clues to the writer Natalia Saunderson’s death: a muff and watch left beside a frozen pond and two parallel skating lines that meet. Following her drowning, Natalia’s manuscripts, a kind of experimental diary, are delivered to a publisher friend, and they provide the details which lay bare the often painful story.

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New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”